


Night Greeted Me With a Sea of Stars

by raven_aorla



Category: Doctor Who, Steam Powered Giraffe
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-11
Packaged: 2017-12-05 01:37:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/717372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raven_aorla/pseuds/raven_aorla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Jon gets lost in his wanderings and catches a ride home on the TARDIS.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night Greeted Me With a Sea of Stars

**Author's Note:**

> Not my characters. Written for fun and love, no money involved. Doctor Who timeline is little vague but bear with me. A gentle reminder to any fans who might be confused: "braces" means "suspenders" in UK English, and "pants" means "men's underwear".
> 
> Dedicated to Douglas Adams, who would have been 61 on this day.

It was nicer, Rory thought, once they got to a point in their personal timeline where they could go for an outing with River without breaking her out of Stormcage. He felt sorry for the guards and also the reminder of his own daughter having to spend years of her life in prison was one he was happy to do without these days. 

She did have a conference to attend, though, and she didn't want to get too far sidetracked. She had just hugged him and Amy goodbye and given the Doctor a kiss that was perhaps three seconds longer than the Doctor was expecting, even at this point, when she said casually on her way out, "That's a Hitchhiker's Thumb signal you're getting, by the way, and it isn't me."

"The what now?" the Doctor asked, darting his head around like an anxious bluejay.

"You shouldn't have thrown your manual into a supernova, sweetie!" she called as the TARDIS doors shut behind her. 

"Don't pout just because the TARDIS tells her things," Amy teased, though Rory saw her furtive dab to the corner of her eye and put an arm around her shoulders in support.

"I'm not pouting, Pond." The Doctor located one of the many tiny lights on the dashboard that evidently was different from all the others and rapidly typed some coordinates. "I've only been with the TARDIS for seven hundred years after all, there's no reason to...ooh, interesting. Very very interesting."

"I do notice that you sometimes use the stabilizers now," Rory couldn't help but point out, since they'd made the journey without any lurching or braking sounds.

"Which one of us here once accidentally created a TARDIS within the TARDIS because we were looking up our wife's skirt and dropped a critical part? Exactly what I thought. Now look at the screen because I don't think I've seen this before, though he certainly has great dress sense." The Doctor swung the monitor showing the exterior view so the two humans could see it better.

They had landed on what looked like a barren moon. Except there was a gold and bronze robot standing just outside the door and waving cheerfully at them. Who wore bright red braces. And a top hat. And a bow tie. And was holding a sign that said "SAN DIEGO AND/OR KAZOOLAND :D"

.......

"Thanks for stopping," the robot said, carelessly dropping his sign to the floor. "Ooh, you've got Earthlike gravity in here. I like that. Means I don't have to tape my hat to my head. Do you have any carbonated beverages? Mister Peter Six fixed me up before I left so I don't just run on Crystal Pepsi anymore since everyone was worried I wouldn't be able to find a reliable supply, but it's got to have carbonation and some kind of sweetening agent."

Rory looked unusually perturbed given the situation and his own generally unflappable nature by this point, but he said, "I think there's some ginger beer in one of the kitchens. I'll go get it."

"How did you get here? In this time period no one from Earth should be capable of being out this far." The Doctor listened to his wrist watch. Because somehow that told him what year it was. Had to be a Time Lord thing. "It's only 2013!"

"Hmmm....well, they had a political coup in Biscuit Town and they rode me out of town on a rail, and it wasn't as fun as I thought it was going to be, so I went off to find the nice pink whale that guards the portal between dimensions and I must have taken a wrong turn at the Ironically Forebodingly Shaped Islands and then I just sort of ended up here. And my unicycle didn't make the trip with me so I couldn't even wheel around the place. It's all pretty vague - ooh, your ship is a very nice lady and she says you have sandwiches but she doesn't know what kind because she's not a specialist on sandwiches and anyway she has a really hard time with tenses when she talks. Did she skip the grammar unit in Weirdly Proportioned Starship School?"

The Doctor blinked a few times, rubbed his face with his palm, and blinked a few more times. "Do you have...some, er, chaperone or next of kin we can contact?"

Amy couldn't help but snicker. "Now you know what it's like for us to deal with you."

"I'm not that bad!"

"Sexy says you are. That's a nice name for a ship I think. My brother was in love with a toaster named Jenny but it didn't last very long because he tripped in the parking lot, though he never explained to us how he knew the toaster was named that because she didn't talk on the wavelength Sexy does. I'm the Jon, by the way."

Rory returned with two bottles of ginger beer. "They're quite dusty, but I hope this will do."

The Doctor took them from Rory and stared at the labels. "Oh dear. It seems like I owe Sarah Jane Smith an apology."

"What?" Amy asked.

"Old friend; traveled with me back when I was a huge enthusiast....er, that would mean these drinks are at least four hundred years old...Jon, does the soda have to be safe for human consumption or is it a purely chemical reaction?"

"It's the Jon, not 'Jon'. Mister Peter Six said he thinks warnings are overrated." The Jon plucked the bottles out of Doctor's hands and pried the cap off one with this teeth, spitting it out with impressive velocity across the control room. "Though he hasn't said it so much these days since he accidentally blew his face off. The Spine says we shouldn't comment on it because it makes him sad. I miss them. Can you take me to San Diego, please? California, Earth, Milky Way." 

"Walter Manor, yes?" Rory asked quietly.

Everyone looked at him. The Jon beamed. "Ooh, does that mean you've seen our shows?"

"Sort of. It's a bit difficult to explain."

 

................

 

After everyone else pestered him to elaborate, Rory said he'd rather tell the whole story to everyone at once so he didn't have to repeat it, as he didn't like dwelling on that portion of his existence too often. The moment the Doctor and Amy figured out what he meant by that they were immediately subdued. The Jon was more interested in alternating beverage consumption with chattering happily to the TARDIS in any case.

Walter Manor definitely had some spatial and temporal anomalies hidden within its walls, and the Doctor suspected it might turn out to be one of those trips, the kind where everything seemed friendly and mild until all of a sudden the fates of an absurd number of lifeforms were at stake and they had to do an awful lot of running and Rory appeared to be dead for a while but then turned out not to be. He didn't say anything about it, though, to avoid tempting fate. Instead he asked, "Why aren't there doors?"

"Mister Peter Six doesn't like doors," The Jon said, before bounding across the field towards the entrance with both his hands up in the air, like a child with unusually jerky and spasmodic movements. "I'M BAAAACK!!!!"

"Are we going to go after him?" Amy asked.

"For once I can say they're not going to hurt us," Rory said, before quickly adding, "At least, not on purpose. Don't touch their musical instruments. Or the Jon's braces."

Their welcoming committee consisted of a tall, titanium-based automaton in a tidy suit and fedora who introduced himself as The Spine, a both-literally-and-metaphorically brassy robot with a red bandana tied around his head called Rabbit, and a sweet mustachioed robot with glasses and the moniker of Hatchworth. The Spine was actually the one who greeted the visitors with a strong handshake and sonorous voice, as the other two were busy hugging the Jon and babbling excited things at each other. 

"I very much appreciate you helping the Jon out," the Spine said. "We were a bit worried about him. He's 117 years old but he still has trouble handling himself."

"I was basically a blithering idiot at 117, myself," the Doctor agreed. "The Jon was making references to a 'Mister Peter Six'?"

"Ah, yes, that's the current Master Walter, since his father has retired from running the estate despite still living here much of the time. Mr. and Mrs. Walter V are currently escorting Norman Becile and his wife Wanda to a specialized optometrist to fit him for glasses that will work with his sideways eye as well as his relatively normal one. Marshmallow was stepping in as our guard but I think the Walter Girls are feeding and grooming her at the moment and that always takes a while. Michael Reed is in the Hall of Wires if you want to talk to a human. Master Walter prefers not to be disturbed unless absolutely necessary."

The Jon burst in, "But the Doctor's an alien! I think Mister Peter would like that!"

"Petey did always want to meet aliens one day," Rabbit agreed. "Used to watch E.T. over and over and got in big trouble for convincing Mike to test his flying bicycle prototype. Little scamps the both of them."

Hatchworth looked confused. "Which one is the Sixth again?"

"The one who fixed you."

"Oh, okay. With the..." and Hatchworth mimed turning a key in a lock, but did so in front of his face.

"Yeah. But don't mention it. When I made a harmless little joke two weeks ago he told me if I said one more thing about it I would wake up from a maintenance session with knees that bent the wrong way."

The Jon mused, "We could call you Flamingo....

The Spine said with practiced exasperation, "I'll send Master Walter a message over the manor wi-fi. Would you guys like to come in more properly? I'm sure we have food somewhere, even with so many people not around right now, I mean Mike eats every day and Peter stocks up late at night every few days with stuff to put in his attic."

"I can make sandwiches," Hatchworth said.

"M-m-maybe not," Rabbit said hastily. "It was you using your torso as portal that caused all those problems in the first place."

"I'm not hungry," Rory reassured their hosts.

The Doctor found himself grinning, even though he wasn't about to write off the situation as totally harmless just yet. "Well, I am. To the kitchen!" 

...............

Hatchworth's odd little gesture to describe the owner of the estate made far more sense once they met Peter Walter VI himself. More accurately, when he limped with relatively high speed into the kitchen and asked, waving his cane for emphasis, "Which one of you is the alien?"

"I am!" the Doctor said, "Would you like some of these excellent enchiladas? Give my compliments to Walter Girl P."

"She really is the best," Rabbit agreed. "Though the Spine's sweet on B."

"Are you gonna take her out dancing on Saturday night?" the Jon asked. He was eating too, evidently for fun rather than nutritional need.

The Spine chose to lean against the wall and look inscrutable and morose rather than reply. Hatchworth had started washing dishes even though no one asked him to and there was a dishwasher already (though why was the dishwasher covered in kiss marks?). 

The robots' comments had somewhat prepared Rory for the man to be masked, though the mask being made of wood strapped to his face with a large keyhole instead of a typical configuration for eyes and mouth did take a moment's adjustment. What was more difficult was how young he looked. His wildly tousled auburn hair, polo shirt peeking out from a knitted vest, cargo shorts, and canvas trainers all made him seem like a gangly university student rather than a reclusive eccentric. Looking closer one could see strange blue crackles emerging from the edges of the area the mask covered. 

And when Peter Walter XI said, in a very different voice, "I prefer to eat alone, thanks," Rory melted somewhere inside.

"This is your house, you can sit down with us at least," Amy said, patting a chair beside her. "If you stay, I'm sure the Doctor will be happy to answer your questions and my husband Rory might be willing to tell us how he knows about all of you."

Peter Walter VI stared at Rory. At least, Rory inferred as much. Rory cleared his throat. "I didn't meet you, but I met the Jon and Rabbit and the Spine. When I spent nearly two thousand years as a plastic automaton replica of myself."

Though Rory wasn't generally enthusiastic about discussing his Lone Centurion centuries, it was pleasant in a way to have the response be enthusiastic curiosity rather than disbelief, pity, or guilt. And it did make Peter Walter VI join them around the table, which gathering from the robots' reactions was a very heartening thing indeed.


End file.
